Breadcrumbs

The gang’s all here. When Soda_Jerk and The Avalanches get together, they invite everybody they know. The recently released collaboration between the two sample-based groups is one of those things that, having happened, now seems utterly inevitable. Both make new things out of old things, one with film, the other with music. The fruit of their union comes to us in the form of a thirteen minute audiovisual collage of movies and cartoons spanning more than sixty years, accompanied by a medley of songs from The Avalanche’s latest album, Wildflower.

The experience of watching it is a kind of sensory unmooring, a drift back through the cultural consciousness in a series of scenes laid over one another with the cohesion of a dream logic that never seems to quite reveal itself, just as the music never quite settles into this or that song. We see faces we know, places we recognize, but the words don’t always match up to the movements of the lips, and the people aren’t always where they should be.

Just before the halfway point, Beavis and Butthead trudge through the paint-huffing scene from Citizen Ruth. A naked Steve Martin from The Jerk wanders by, covering himself with dogs. “Marie, Marie!” He cries.

“Everything decent’s been done,” says Butthead, borrowing a monologue from Pump Up the Volume. “All the great themes have been used up, turned into theme parks. So I don’t really find it exactly cheerful to be living in the middle of a totally exhausted decade, where there’s nothing to look forward too and no one to look up to.”

But the early 90’s malaise doesn’t last long. The next scene has everyone pillaging the supermarket to the tune of Biz Markie, pulling things off the shelves, gorging themselves on whatever they can find. This is how sampling works. The Was is an exercise in defeating the exhaustion of the used-up by breaking it all down, picking up the fragments and rearranging them into something that is both unrecognizable and familiar.

From there, the video moves into a realm of double exposure as the Lords of Dogtown skate through a mashup of pool parties. The pool is at once empty and full, the water receding with a rush into the blue concrete wave of a SoCal afternoon. The finale comes in bursts of flame across suburbia, on roofs and bushes, a faint fire that might be in front of the couples kissing beside whitewashed houses, or might lie just beyond them. It’s difficult to tell, with everything as a calculated unsettling of the images, all of them flickering together at once. All in all, it’s a strangely comfortable feeling of disorientation.

“It’s a world of fantasy,” sing the chorus girls, and they’re right. It still is. It always was.

The end of the universe may come as a state of perfect equilibrium, a point of balance between all forces and exchanges such that nothing is capable of happening. At that point, we will all be thoroughly bored to death. This year’s blockbuster contributions from both Marvel and DC have brought us incrementally closer to such a death, a series of films depicting the superheroic clash of various costumed ideological vehicles, all amounting to more or less nothing.

The story of addiction always involves a chase, so it’s no surprise that Open Mike Eagle & Paul White’s new video for “Admitting the Endorphin Addiction” features just that. What is of interest here is not so much the chase itself as the thing being chased: a high that looks like the mesmerizing smile of Isis Avalos. Open Mike Eagle plays himself, again unsurprisingly, since the song is from his latest album, titled Hella Personal Film Festival.

Louis C.K. may have the most emotive brow of all time. It scrunches and wrinkles as he listens. He sighs. Sometimes a smile plays across his lips. Sometime his face falls. Sometimes he weeps, holding his head in his hands. In his latest series, Horace and Pete, he stars as a chronically sad bar owner, Horace Wittel, alongside a fantastically manic Steve Buscemi as Pete Wittel, his brother/cousin and co-owner of the bar. The confused familial relationship of the duo is just the tip of an iceberg that extends deep into the history of televised drama and the subconscious of a uniquely American dysfunctionality.

I first heard Goldlink way in the backseat of Baltimore producer Tek-Lun’s 2014 release, Ridin’ Round. One of only two passengers, his verse on the penultimate track, “Hip Hop,” is the climactic moment of the ride. Goldlink is still on the road. This past November saw the release of his sophomore album, entitled And After That We Didn’t Talk.

At the end of The Martian, Matt Damon’s stranded astronaut turned dapper professor gives an inspiringly light hearted speech to a group of young astronauts who are about to begin their training for the next manned mission to mars. He says something like this: